Some news :
- fourth LCD type is a loss, one out of six failed like types two and three.
- fifth LCD type is much more resilient but less sunlight-readable. Still is but not at all-angles like type 1.
- I'll decide wednesday based on first trials.

- It's now COVID lag effect. I made stocks at the start and it had no impact so far. But my last orders are harder. Broken inventories, shipping restrictions, and legal cloudiness means my last few orders are 7-15 days past arrival date. This concerns solvents, resins, glues, memories, batteries, shipping goods, textile, accessories. And I can't laser cut textile/packing foam for the foreseeable future. Got a bit of stock left of everything but replenishment are late.

- All in all it's fine and moving forward. I'll be done with Small 5-packs this week and LCD is making its come back.

- Doc for Small is here, second block : www.motion-gps.com/motion/documentation.html
- Please firmware update it before use, it takes 5 minutes.
- Map is disabled now, will be added next month as it requires your device to connect to internet and we need more trial time.

Julien, you can do what you can do, all things other than that are out of you control.

I think for the next 6 months people just have to be a bit Zen, cause it's going to take a while before things start flowing properly.

One consolation is if you can't make GPS's the (hopefully) you can get out for a sail.

This popped up in my facebook feed... Obviously not waterproof, but CBC milled on demand.
mainlandelectronics.com.au/arduino-mega-case?utm_source=23844458463680422

Our teams delivery arrived today. Logger looks great, smaller than I expected. Delivery included logger, strap, USB cable and wireless Qi charger.

Thanks Julien for building this for our community! Look forward to trying it out soon. Fingers crossed this is the device (once approved) than can get the masses back into GPS sailing after the disappointments of the GW60.

Looks great, love the size!

To all those opening their new toys this week. The motion devices produce .oao files. KA72 can read these directly, but older programs like Realspeed cannot. I have found "GPS Speedreader" to be a great way to study your files. It is available here ecwindfest.org/GPS/GPSSpeedreaderHelp.html . If you are looking for on the water feedback then you may like to have a look at my Garmin Datafields.

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tbwonder said..
To all those opening their new toys this week. The motion devices produce .oao files. KA72 can read these directly, but older programs like Realspeed cannot. I have found "GPS Speedreader" to be a great way to study your files. It is available here ecwindfest.org/GPS/GPSSpeedreaderHelp.html . If you are looking for on the water feedback then you may like to have a look at my Garmin Datafields.

Your profile pic is doing my head in..

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tbwonder said..
To all those opening their new toys this week. The motion devices produce .oao files. KA72 can read these directly, but older programs like Realspeed cannot. I have found "GPS Speedreader" to be a great way to study your files. It is available here ecwindfest.org/GPS/GPSSpeedreaderHelp.html . If you are looking for on the water feedback then you may like to have a look at my Garmin Datafields.

Nice simple app. Great for when you leave the gps switched on for the drive home. And it works in Linux!

There's a dumb 3am-coding bug in all new devices : a full battery shows up as 89% (thx Russell & Kamil). I'll publish the firmware during the weekend as I have many improvements to verify.

LCD type 5 are fine so far.

OAO are supported directly by GPSResults, GPSSpeedReader, GPSAR but you might need to update them first.
And KA72 and GPSSpeedSurfing accept its direct upload.

Well, our small Motions have finally arrived, after being held over in customs for around 12 days.
And... we couldn't be happier. Simple, solid and so easy to use. Easy to post to GPSTC, through KA72, using our phones. Great job Julien.

Awesome news, hopefully the Tassie ones will b here shortly

Hey Guys, I don't think they've actually been approved yet.
I think it's just a formality really. I'm sure Julien has tested them thoroughly and the GPS recording is the same as the big motions, except with a bigger antenna. So if anybody is wearing an approved device as well as the logger, please send the files to the GPSTC, and we can evaluate them, and hopefully give approval very quickly.

Was under the assumption that the loggers came about as a solution to the halt in production of the full Motions because of the screen failure issues- people asking for 'screen-less Motions' as an interim measure... so the loggers have exactly the same internals, no screen, smaller battery, bigger antenna.
If I am correct in the above, hopefully formal approval of the small Motion will be expedient.

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mikey100 said..
Was under the assumption that the loggers came about as a solution to the halt in production of the full Motions because of the screen failure issues- people asking for 'screen-less Motions' as an interim measure... so the loggers have exactly the same internals, no screen, smaller battery, bigger antenna.
If I am correct in the above, hopefully formal approval of the small Motion will be expedient.

Please send log files to info@gpsteamchallenge.com.au so the logger can be quickly verified by the Technical Advisers. You will need files from the same session from both the Motion Logger & either a GW52, GW60, Motion or GT31

I have our shipment and have started testing. It is more a matter of working out if there are any particular instructions or settings that we need to specify. We are extremely confident that the data itself will be excellent. We should know in a day or so but any help from the community is most welcome. If you have any comments or side by side files from side by side testing with any approved GPS, please send them in.

I'm just looking at 2 files Ian Wright has sent in, one of the new logger at 10hz and a GT 31 at 1hz. This demonstrates quite well how 10hz gives a much better result. logger in blue GT31 in red.
Here's a 2sec view from GPSSpeedreader





This depiction isn't quite accurate, every 1 sec the GT 31 reports speed, 10 X a sec the logger reports speed. So this 2s is selected on the fastest average of the 10hz data. Whereas the GT 31 data is offset to this, and misses out on the optimum average.

Looks like a great "pack", nice work Julien
Sailquick, how does it feel strapped to your arm? I currently use a Paqua + GT strapped to the shoulder strap of my vest. Not ideal I know, but strapped on my arm it constantly slides to the underside, which is probably worse as well as being bloody annoying! The solid Motion strap looks better to me. I might cut some slots in the back of my helmet too.

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Stretchy said..
Looks like a great "pack", nice work Julien
Sailquick, how does it feel strapped to your arm? I currently use a Paqua + GT strapped to the shoulder strap of my vest. Not ideal I know, but strapped on my arm it constantly slides to the underside, which is probably worse as well as being bloody annoying! The solid Motion strap looks better to me. I might cut some slots in the back of my helmet too.

I have not had a chance to sail with it yet, but on dry land it feels like it would slide around the arm pretty easily. The 'strap' is elastic, which means it can be tightened, but that could be uncomfortable. The original LCD Motion type neoprene arm band was very stable. I think it would be pretty easy to cook something like that up yourself. Otherwise, I think I would recommend putting it inside some sort of small arm band bag. At least if it got stripped off in a crash, it should then float.

So far the data from the Motion Logger is pretty much as expected. There seems to be an issue with a couple of minor things.
Here are my preliminary thoughts so far:

The first is a charateristic of this Ublox chip to keep reporting speeds after a crash when the satellites drop to zero. The software filters should pick this up and discard those points but it appears that not all software is doing this at the moment.(GPS-results seems to be handling it correctly.) This is just a matter of the software analysis authors adjusting their software if required and users checking their results carefully. It is more likely to affect longer divisions like NM, but could affect others if there are sudden crashes. This was most obvious in some foiling sample data.

The second is an apparent tendancy for missed points (200ms) occaisionally when the Motion is using over 20 satellites. Julien is adjusting the max number used in the calculation to 18 best sats. He thinks this will solve that issue. Watch out for a firmware update to fix this.

While the logger has a larger antenna, it is still vulnerable to losing reception from poor wearing location. For example, today I did a test on a motorbike with it in my jacket pocket and there are a LOT of low sat numbers and therefore filtered points. This is particularly relevant to some sailors who would like to carry it in their bouancy or crash vest pocket. As with all the other GPS devices, this is a very bad idea for two reasons: 1. the body shields and blocks the view of a large number of satellites meaning the unit may not see enough for a fix (minimum of 5)
2. The material of the garment, particularly if it is wet, can very effectivly block or severely reduce the satellite signal reaching the antenna.
For best results it will need to be worn somewhere on the body where it has best, unrestricted sky view. The upper arm is excellent with the usual caveat that it must not be allowed to slip around under the arm. The wrist is a very poor option for the same reason as the GW-60. Underhand grip will severly degade the satellite signal and therefor lead to more errors, missed points and degraded accuracy. The Top of the helmet is ideal but not always practical for everyone.

More info to come soon.

The quality filter is set high with the expectation you'll wear it face up, on your arm or helmet, on water (thus without buildings and trees). Anything else will see the filter resign. So yes, it could work in a jacket, a forest or indoors but the only goal is to output indisputable records.

I now believe that certain constellations are bigger workloads than others and the ratio might be different here and there thus affecting the amount of dropped points which was 0 here. I check for it when I test each device.
Now, these are seldom and all above 20 sats which leads me to believe that using the 18 bests might be the sweet spot.

Here's a longer explanation of the quality filter. Most devices (all I've known) are "best effort". They try to produce a solution with whatever they have, be it 5 poor links. This leads to disputable records where data is on the line between valid and invalid, eventually because the device knew something was wrong but its filter inertia delayed the alarm bells. I'd like to move away from this.

If the scale of link quality is 0-100, Motion Logger gets :
- 94 in speed sailing,
- 88 in a car,
- 60 in a dense forest, indoor or in a jacket,
- 30 when you waterstart.

Now, 60 is enough to produce an okayish solution. Is it interesting? No. I much prefer cutoff at 75 and have indisputable records. There's no reason your run would start at 90 and end under 75 other than a freak event like a fall. Doing it like this means the fall is detected and the run invalidated straight away, no slow fade of accuracy.

It wouldn't make a great forest-trekking device because the filter would throw away the okayish points. But I don't expect anyone to use it for anything else than speedsurfing. If it's your plan, hit me up.

sounds good to me Julien, if people complain of missing data we'll just tell them to position the device better.

Excellent post Julien. Thanks. :-)

Correction for confusion on my part. The issue we saw with the foiling crash and speeds continuing to be written with zero satellites turns out to be probably a non issue. The software programs will pick up on the zero satellites as designed and discard those points.

Just awesome... apart from being able to download files and post, through KA72, to GPSTC, think I have worked out that I can update the firmware via my phone also.

OK, we've had very positive tests. Left motion logger, right blue tooth 10hz logger. The motion is almost twice as accurate, probably because it uses 3 GNNS and the other 2.
So we're sending a request to the advisory panel for full approval. That shouldn't take long depending how many are on line.

Here is an interesting observation I made while looking at two Motion 10Hz Logger tracks made at the same time.

There has long been speculation that the small sawtooth variations we see in 5Hz and 10Hz unfilterd, non 'smoothed' speed graphs may be some sort of random error.

This seemed like a plausible theory for quite a while until we noticed that the pattern from identical devices worn at the same time often show a pretty good correlation in the sawtooth. That suggested they were either real variations in speed (at a very small level) or that whatever error caused them was happening at almost the same instant. We thought the latter was probably less likely as random errors would not be expected to correlate.

Today, while studying some recent comparisons I did on the motorbike, I noticed a pattern in the graph which I realised was the very slight pauses as I changed gears. It's a constant mesh type gearbox, so the changes are only a fraction of a second, but they are clearly visible in the speed graph at 10Hz. In this case, the two Loggers were not both together in my helmet. One was in the helmet and the other on my arm. One (the blue line) seems to have picked up the gear change/speed change, more obviously than the other. I did not note which GPS was in the helmet, but I suspect it was the one that picked it up more obviously.

To me, this is just more evidence to suggest that the small sawtooth we see is actually, or mostly, real changes in speed, and not so likely some random error.

It's also interesting to note that, if the Blue line one was in my helmet as I strongly suspect, it is seeing a couple more satellites (with strong signal) most of the time. This would be consistent with it having a slightly more unobstructed sky view compared with the upper arm.

I guess I am now going to have to do another test with both loggers in the helmet. It would be nice if I could do some sailing tests, but we are in the Autumn Doldrums down here.

Sawtooth - effect of chop?

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Stretchy said..
Sawtooth - effect of chop?

When sailing, possibly, when on a motor bike no.

The phasing of the sawtooth from two different devices seems to vary depending on how far apart they are. This could be caused by the body parts responding differently to chop. When they are next to each other they are in phase more often, but not completely 100%. So maybe it's a combination of things.

Daring bug finders can try 3001 : www.motion-gps.com/motion/downloads/Motion-Small-3001.bin

How-to : www.motion-gps.com/motion/documentation/firmware-update-wifi-small.html

Fixes battery level, raises wifi level, adds speed/distance units on website, adds a chart for runs, change discussed above for filter, a handful of other insignificant errors.

You might need to refresh the website by pressing SHIFT+F5 keys at times, to clear your browser's cache.

Chart/map will only show up when you click on a run in the log page. To avoid rendering all this for nothing when you view it from a phone.